


The Price We Pay (To Be The Last Rat Standing)

by j_knight13



Series: Chess's James Bond Things [3]
Category: GoldenEye (1995), James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: And only James survived, Angst, Character Death, Ill regret this later, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts, Poor James, Someone Take My Keyboard Off Me, The World ended, Trigger Warning!, scratch that I regret this now, what happens when Chess is bored
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 20:59:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15671196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_knight13/pseuds/j_knight13
Summary: The world ends on a Sunday. Bond survives. He's the last living man on earth. But not the last dead one.Bond has ghosts. Ghosts that haunt him, ghosts that play and ghosts that hate. Ghosts that loved too much, didn't love enough.007 has ghosts. Ghosts that plot and plan, ghosts that scheme and stalk and kill. Ghosts that snarl and smirk and laugh.James has ghosts. Ghosts that wail and scream and tear at him. Ghosts that hate and hunt and love, love with every fibre of his being





	The Price We Pay (To Be The Last Rat Standing)

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: I wrote this at 2am and published it at 3am, so it was kinda crappy. Went back over and edited it.

Eve comes in the mornings. She wears black jeans and a white shirt and a tan coat. She holds a gun and a sniper rifle. The white shirt has blood blossoming like a rose. She tells him quiet cheerfully a metal pole stuck her through the chest during the storms as she gently passes the straight razor over his cheeks and neck.

“Noble death,” she remarks, dipping the razor in the bowl of water she's brought with her and sitting back with a pleased smirk. James doesn't touch his face. He knows he'll still feel the beginnings of the scraggly beard.

“Eve Moneypenny, the woman who killed James Bond, death by flying flag pole.” She straightens up.

“Resurrection always was a hobby of yours, wasn't it?”

* * *

 

Alec comes during the day. He brings a bottle of strong vodka and two cracked shot glasses, wears a brown leather jacket and jeans that are torn on one leg. His face is scarred and burned and he doesn't particularly care. They drink and sit and stare mournfully at the sky, and neither of them talk about their feelings but they don't have to.

“Could be beautiful,” Alec remarks, calmly surveying the red sand, red sky. James gives him a confused look and the Russian grins, leaning heavily on him but James doesn't feel a thing.

“Come on, Jameska. I am just a figment of your imagination, no? You should understand.” 

"Figments of my imagination are annoying,” James mumbles, and Alec snorts in amusement, taking a long swig straight from his bottle. James tries not to watch the scar that distorts grotesquely on his best friend’s face.

“So are you.”

* * *

 

Q comes in the afternoon. He always comes carrying a case. In that case is a gun. There's no radio. No pen either. Q sits and complains lightly about R’s latest shenanigans, about old Scot Gertie who hated him with a passion and he her (except they really didn't, not at all). James is happy to just listen.

“Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled,” Q murmurs every night before he leaves, staring somewhat mournfully at the weapon he's brought.

“Unfortunately. We do miss you, 007.” Even after Q leaves James gets to keep the gun, but it doesn't stay shiny and sleek and new once its maker is gone. It's heavy in his hands. One bullet. One life. A thousand lives.

* * *

 

Vesper comes in the evening, and it might be wrong, she didn't die with the rest of them but James doesn't particularly care. Vesper is wearing her dress, sometimes hanging heavy and damp, and her hair is sometimes dangling in wet rat tails down her back. Other times her dress fans around her legs and her hair curls like smoke in the air around her, and she stares at him through dark, heavy, eerie eyes. Sometimes she gently takes the gun from his hand and then gives it back to him firmly, touch clammy and cold. Other times she keeps her distance. Vesper doesn't speak. Neither does he.

* * *

 

M, the old M, visits at night. James doesn't think about how that's wrong too. Once she brings Mallory. She grumps and grumbles and tells him to get off his arse, go fix this fucking mess, but James can't so he doesn't. That one time Mallory comes, the other man eyes the gun with the single bullet somewhat warily.

“Do make your choices wisely, 007,” he says. M tells him he better not fuck up his last chance.

“You do, and I'll make sure you never see the light of day again,” she warns him.

* * *

 

The other double-ohs appear occasionally. Scarlett comes by once or twice. Her long black hair is, as always, immaculately piled on top of her head. Her skinny jeans are tight and her shirt is even tighter, just like always, and the slash of red on her lips matches the slash of red on her neck. The wound gapes and twists every time she moves, and the collar of her shirt is dyed red.

“Piece of metal caught me,” she remarks offhandedly. “Hurt like a bitch.” She offers him a bottle of whiskey, and no matter how much they drink, it never seems to empty.

Jack appears about once a week. There's a gaping hole in his back, but from the front you can't tell anything’s wrong, not at all. He sits and complains that Alec keeps stealing his stuff, and they play a game of poker that neither of them win at but it’s funny, because there's one chip that always ends up in James’ hand, whenever he's about to lose a game. It's not a chip at all. It's a bullet. Jack always wrinkles his nose, gets up and vanishes when that chip appears. The game generally vanishes with him, scattered on wind and sand. Once or twice, all the other pass by.

Raven sniffs and tells him to get his sorry arse into gear.

Miles takes lazy pot shots and brings down the scrawny vultures overhead as he sings rowdy folk songs, using an old sniper rifle that was buried in sand for ages before he found it, until he leaves and James reluctantly lowers the rifle, gets up to go and collect the kills.

Amelia just sits and swears at him in the familiar Scottish brogue, and James lets his proper British accent slip and swears back, and both of them seem to need it.

Tom tells him stories from wherever the hell his hallucinations go when they aren't with him. They get up to some crazy shit, it sounds like- gambling, falling off trains, climbing mountains, dying and living, loving and loosing. Then at some point he realises Tom is telling James his story- the casino, the quantum, the sky, the spectres.

Elizabeth, like M and Mallory and Raven, tells him to get his shit together.

Blofeld visits once.  
“I wonder where your little psychiatrist is now,” he murmurs. “Would that help? A spectre, telling you how to rid yourself of her. Would that help? Would that work?”

 

Silva visits once. “The price we pay to live,” he whispers, and his face is collapsed, is crumbled. Here is a man who didn't die right. “The price we pay to be the last rat standing.”

They stop coming after the first year.

They don't say goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> Eve is saying that he's good at staying alive, may as well keep going a bit longer.  
> Alec agrees and says that James could get used to the harsh landscape, might adapt to it.  
> Q’s telling James it's not the best decision, but it is an option to kill himself.  
> Vesper thinks he should just get it over and done with. To her it's no use drawing out suffering.  
> M and Mallory don't think he should do one of the other. They're telling him to think it over carefully.  
> Scarlett doesn't give a damn. To her life and death don't make a difference- either way she'd be in pain.  
> Jack does not approve. James always gets that ‘chip’ when he's losing a game because the game is just his subconscious comparing it to life- you can't win, but sometimes there's worst things that can happen than losing. And sometimes, you make your own rotten hand worse.
> 
> I'm sorry... I should not have done this...


End file.
